Psst! Watch Phototropism, my new experiment.


Anxious Timer

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I wrote a tiny program about anxiety and commitment. It’s an iPhone app and you can download it on the App Store.

It’s hard to write about this app without spoiling anything, so it’s better if you try it yourself. I suspect it helps if you are a to-do list kind of person. I know I am. Sometimes I half-jokingly tell people that I live thanks to my to-do list. There are days, though, when I feel this sour realisation that, beyond supporting the most basic needs, everything in life is arbitrary, self-imposed, and… not “real”? (You can tell I have recently re-watched The Matrix). At the same time there’s this background radiation, external or internal pressure to do more, where “more” is undefined. So, at least in my mind, the app is a little bit about that.

It is also about a half-serious joke. It goes like this. A person is complaining to you that they have too many things to do. To which you cheerfully reply that they can finish all their tasks in a finite amount of time. They just need to do each task twice as fast as the previous one.

It remains to be seen, whether the joke is on me… or on you.